As artists it is part of our creative curiosity to push ourselves and our art to the limits. War, love, hate, confusion, obsession, disgust: it’s all part of the Human Condition we grow to learn about and try to understand in the time we have.

One of the easiest boundaries to attack [in the US-American culture at any rate] is sexuality - not only because this is a society so entrenched in morality wars but because sexual identity is thrown at us everyday. From the Abercrombie & Fitch ads plastering billboards to dime store romance novels to the way we dress our children and teach toddlers the "gender appropriate" differences between "what boys do" and "what girls do" it all swings around what might swing between your legs.

Art is intimacy. It is highly sensual. We touch it, see it, smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it with our minds as we imagine and work in ways which manipulate reality. To draw a nude is to caress those same lines that make up the perception of a human being into existence. What a photographer does with a lens or a musician creates with catgut amounts to the same thing – a sensual experience that can be as intellectual or evocative as the observer perceives.

Like eating and surviving there’s a world of ways to go about it and a world of different viewpoints that follow. In Victorian times to see a woman’s ankles was scandalous. Nowadays there seem to be unspoken competitions as to how little a person can wear in public without getting arrested. 500 years ago girls were married off – sex and all – as soon as they hit puberty. These days people are waiting later to get married and have children of their own. 1000 years ago marriage was a contract – nothing more. Yesterday a friend regaled me with how she and her circle of friends in high school "played around" all the time while she was growing up. Romeo today would be arrested as a pedophile.

Guess what? Kids learn about sex in different ways. Get the fuck over it.

Mind you, I’m not advocating a lack of censorship or authority, just wanting to point out how grey the lines are between Art and "Titillating One-Handed Viewing Material" [to use some phrase other than a loaded buzz word]. What works for one person in one way may for someone else be interprably different. Guidance for our citizens, particularly our younger members, is one thing but oppressive "protection" is something different.

Adolescence is a turbulent time in a person’s life. It’s when someone starts learning about who they are and what the world is about. Aspects of duty, education, social interaction, commerce and personal identity – including sexuality – are all throwing themselves upon a person at once. What’s more as can be seen in an American culture and most especially in an artistic one, the concept of "individuality" is esteemed highly. As such an up-and-coming young person attempting to understand, contribute to, gain feedback from and be accepted by such a group of like-minded people naturally has some teeth to cut first.

It should come as no surprise that young people are submitting "inappropriate" deviations when, from just a precursory glance of today’s featured deviations, such things as Coconut ‘n’ Tequila, cowgirl kitty-Non Flash, Acedia and Gula Corsets, Wonder-World, Shut Eye or the digital works of artists such as azazel1944 are being promoted as ‘highly popular’, acceptable or having exceptional artistic worth.

So don’t say that this creation of potentially titillating one-handed viewing material is acceptable as Art while a photograph of the exact same thing is not because that is BULL FUCKING SHIT. This is the community we live in and sex, while it also sells, is also an Art.

Rules should be established and enforced, and they have been, but keep in mind how biased or inadequate laws can become as humanity refines itself around them. "Age of consent" varies per country, sexual orientation or epoch. Internalizing rules can only establish so much discipline, criminalizing societal deviants can only deter so many and fine lines between "pushing the limits" and "going too far" are constantly crossed, erased and redrawn but how many of us have found out in pursuit of our craft that if there’s a will there’s always a way?

But hey, maybe fifty-five-thousand pageviews are wrong. And if parents are really concerned with how artistically their children are growing, maybe they should be more involved.